Well we didn't get a big limit today but we managed to stick it out in some adverse conditions and bring in 10lbs 1oz which was good enough for 6th place! This makes our second National Championship qualification as freshmen, we will fishing in B.A.S.S.'s in August (Bemidgi Lake, MN) as well as FLW's (unannounced) next year. Not to mention that we have done it out of a 17' aluminum boat that tops out at 37mph.
This week was an absolute blast! I was already a spotted bass nut, so the Coosa River was pretty much a dream location and I got to fish for a week on it! In three days of practice and three tournament days, I expect we landed between 150 and 200 spots, it was pretty insane! We caught nearly every one of them on a 1/2oz finesse jig with a zoom ultravibe speed craw as a trailer. We threw the jigs on 7' MH rods with 15lb fluorocarbon.
Our pattern was to look for banks with current breaks on them, in 8-15FOW. We would drift with the current flipping the jigs to the current seams, and almost stroking them back to the boat, ripping them up about a foot or so off the bottom and letting them fall straight back down. Since the boat was also moving, you could cover a lot of water just drifting and working your jig in this manner. When we got a bite, it was almost always a school of them, and we would use the trolling motor to hold our position in the current and usually have a flurry of 3-10 bites in a few minutes before the group of fish would either disperse or shut down. Either way it was a very noticeable change from a bite on every drift through the spot to no bites at all once they were done. In practice, we would do this, but shake the fish off on our jigs and mark a waypoint on our gps. For the most part either the schools didn't move between practice and days 1 and 2, or the spots just held a lot of fish.
Over the course of three days, the river dropped 5' and slowed way down, so we had to adjust to it. On day 1 we fished fairly close to the banks, the water had dropped about a foot and was still flowing hard. On day two it was down about 3' and moving slower, this eliminated about half of our spots because they either didn't have enough current on them or were too shallow. On the spots that did hold fish, we had to back off and fish deeper in the current. Any type of depth change on these spots that provided a current break on the bottom usually held fish, and just like the day before, you could have a fast and furious flurry on every group of them. We landed over 40 bass on each of the first two days, we would try to count but when you start catching them on every cast and having double hookups, things spin out of control!
Today was considerably tougher, the river was now 5' lower, eliminating all of our areas, the fish simply weren't on them. We fished two deep areas that we had been finding nice schools of 17" plus spots on, but they yielded only a 13"er. We also had to start throwing a deep diving crankbait, the fish were able to roam in the slower current and were keying on shad, we saw sporadic fish on the surface chasing them. We saw one area with periodic breaking fish, and managed to fill our limit there by holding the boat in place with the trolling motor and throwing DD22's downstream and bringing them back towards the boat.
After that, we headed to completely new water closer to the dam where we found stronger current and grinded it out with jigs managing to cull our way up to about 8lbs with one 13"er still in the well we needed to get rid of. This was interrupted by some drama, the boat wouldn't start when we were getting close to making the 40 minute run back to the ramp, but after some phone calls to the tournament director and then to dad, I managed to get it started. Left it idling as we fished one last stretch of bank, and I managed to cull out that little one with about a 2lb fish.
If you made it this far, good job, here are some pics!
If someone can figure out what is going on in this photo I would sure like to know
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